Lib at Large: Marin singer Deborah Winters finds her voice in jazz

LIKE MANY baby boomers, San Anselmo singer Deborah Winters grew up listening to the music of her parents' generation — Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Sinatra. But as soon as she was old enough, she rejected all that for the youth and excitement of rock 'n' roll, for singer-songwriters like Joni Mitchell, Carole King and Rickie Lee Jones.

"Part of my wanting to do my own thing was to get away from my dad, who played drums, saying, 'You gotta do jazz,'" she remembered. "I wanted to do something else, to make my own statement."

But after years of trying to make it as a guitar-playing singer-songwriter, and never really achieving the breakthrough success that would sustain a career, Winters has turned to the music her parents played in her childhood, collaborating with jazz trumpeter Peter Welker, who produced and arranged her dazzling new album, "Lovers After All," on the speciality label Jazzed Media. It got my attention as soon as I put it on. And I'm hardly alone.

The respected jazz critic and educator Herb Wong says in the liner notes that the passing of grand jazz divas like Ella and Billie Holiday and Sarah Vaughan has inspired a long line of wannabe singers eager to take their place in that pantheon.

"Deborah Winters is an easy nominee for one of the coveted seats," he writes. "Her sensational attributes on this CD speak with convincing eloquence and a soulful jazz spirit."

Allaboutjazz.com says that with this album, Winters "establishes herself as a ballad singer with which to be reckoned." A host of DJs on the jazz station KCSM agree, spinning several songs from "Lovers After All" on their shows. And in his blog girlsingers.org, Doug Boynton writes: "In a world of winsome girl singers, it's refreshing to hear someone who sounds like they've really been there, and done that. No girl singer. A woman, singing."

The turning point for Deborah was hooking up, through mutual friends, with the Petaluma-based Welker, a veteran jazz bandleader who produced a CD with singer Jeff Oster that All About Jazz magazine voted best of 2009 in the jazz vocal category.

At first, Welker was skeptical about Deborah Winters. He'd never heard of her, for one thing. And there are lots of aspiring "chick singers," to use musicians' vernacular, who think they can abandon rock for jazz. So he put off meeting her for a year, until those persistent friends brought her to one of his gigs. He thought, "OK, let see what she's got," and invited her to sit in with his band.

"She sang 'Night and Day' and just killed it," Welker recalled. "It was great. I'll never forget it. I've worked with all the gal singers in the Bay Area — Madeline Eastman, Kitty Margolis, Kim Nalley and on and on. They're all good. But as soon as I heard Deborah, I thought, 'Oh, my god, there is something really special here.'"

When Welker offered to work on a jazz album with her, Deborah agreed, but with a degree of uncertainty about changing the course of her career at this stage of the game.

"It was a big decision for me to make," she told me. "I've always been trying to do my art and write my songs and do my thing. In all honesty, we're all rock 'n' rollers in a way. But, as you age, to be up there playing rock, or doing that folkie singer-songwriter-band thing, I don't think it's so complimentary, at least not for me. I thought that singing jazz could be a wonderful way for me to stay in the music industry."

With this album, Deborah seems to have found her calling after years of frustration.

"I laugh about it now, but I have to honestly say that deep down, I probably wanted to not do what my dad loved," she said with a giggle. "But when I think back, maybe I should have started this at the very beginning. Maybe I would have gotten further along in my career and saved myself a lot of grief. But I think for my future, doing this seems more fitting, and its shown another side of myself that has been pretty rewarding so far."